Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University
professor and director of the Earth
Institute, is one of our leading public intellectuals.
A trained economist (who became
a full professor at Harvard University
when he was only 29 years old), Sachs
boldly ventures into other disciplines. He
is as agile citing the latest biological studies
on habitat change as he is referring to
obscure econometric research on monetary
policy.

Unlike many academics, Sachs is committed
to getting his ideas out to the public,
authoring the best-selling book The End of
Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
and, most recently, Common Wealth: Economics
for a Crowded Planet. And he is not
afraid to put his theories into action. In the
1980s Sachs helped the Bolivian government
fight hyperinflation; in the 1990s he
helped Poland and Russia transition from
communism to capitalism; and in the 2000s
he worked with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi
Annan to implement the Millennium Development
Goals.

Because of his wide-ranging theoretical
and practical work, not only is Sachs one of
the few people who understand the scope
of the world’s economic, social, and environmental
challenges, he is also able to
come up with practical solutions to solve
them. Critics may question Sachs’s ideas
and solutions, but they can’t question his
commitment.

In this interview with Stanford Social
Innovation Review Managing Editor Eric
Nee, Sachs explains why sustainable development
is humanity’s most pressing challenge,
why lifting billions of people out of
poverty is the first order of business, and
why the development of new technologies
offers the best hope for simultaneously increasing
economic growth while reducing
our impact on the planet.

Eric Nee: You have spent decades studying
and trying to fix some of the world’s thorniest
problems, such as economic development
and poverty. How would you characterize
the state of affairs?

Jeffrey Sachs: The world has become extraordinarily
crowded with about 6.8 billion
people. At the same time, production has
become so efficient, and demand for basic
resources is rising at such an extraordinary
rate, that we are pressing very hard against
the earth’s ecosystems. As a result, we have
a remarkable amount of geopolitical change,
from unprecedented economic success stories
like China, to calamitous economic andhumanitarian crises like the one in the
Horn of Africa.

When you add it all together, I see a
crowded, interconnected, and environmentally
stressed world, facing the added stress
of huge political change and very deep crises
in certain regions. The challenge is finding
a path that brings rising levels of prosperity
for all that does not simultaneously undermine
the physical life-support systems of
the planet—in other words, sustainable
development. We’ve not figured out how to
do that yet.

You have been working on economic development
for more than 25 years. When did
you begin to understand the ecological aspects
of the issue?

For a long time I thought of the challenge
of globalization mostly in economic terms—how can each part of the world find an effective
role in what is quickly becoming a single
integrated global economy. The more I
immersed myself in those issues, the more
I found out that the physical world kept intruding
in ways that I had not been trained
to expect and that I hadn’t worked on before.
For example, the epidemic diseases that engulfed
Africa, especially in the last 25 years
with the spread of AIDS, but also the resurgence
of malaria and other killers.

As I began to look more closely at those
issues, and especially as I got more involved
in the rural challenges in south Asia, Africa,
and Latin America, the fragility of the resource
base became a more and more dramatic
signal that something was wrong. I
was seeing it with my own eyes. Entire regions
were trapped in famine by repeated
droughts, where the short rains had essentially
disappeared entirely and the land was
so degraded that large areas were bereft of
reliable crops.

None of this is novel to an ecologist or to
those who have been in the forefront of environmental
challenges. I discovered it by
wending through this maze of challenges,
starting from macroeconomics, moving on
to development, coming to realize the impact
of disease, food production, and hunger,
and more recently dealing with challenges
like energy, climate change, and water.

A problem of this magnitude can seem unsolvable.
How do you make it a manageable
problem that people believe can be solved?

As we train ourselves to address these problems
we need to be able to pull them apart to
their constituent components. But we also
need to be able to go in the other direction,
because many of the areas of expertise and
technology that are a part of the solutions are
now inside silos. The intellectual and practical
tasks are both to take a large problem and
put it into manageable components, and at
the same time move in the other direction
that brings different parts of the university,
different parts of our knowledge system, and
different parts of government together so
that we can find the cross-linkages.

You’ve identified two institutions, universities
and government, that are some of the
most resistant to change.

I think government is the harder one to
change. Universities have increasingly recognized
that the problems we’re addressing
don’t come packaged by departments.
There’s a tremendous amount of ferment in
universities—new programs, more interdisciplinary
work, new institutions. Great
universities recognize not only that they are
engaged in the research and teaching of disciplinary
expertise, but that they also have
to be engaged in problem solving. Problems
don’t always come packaged the way we
would like them to be, and sustainable development
absolutely does not come packaged
according to traditional lines of faculty
or departments. I’m rather optimistic about
what I’m seeing at the universities, as long
as the spirit of the university is to engage
deeply as a participant in actual problem
solving and not see itself as an outside
scorekeeper or observer.

How do we tackle the problem of sustainable
development?

I view the sustainable development challenge
as having two components. The first
component is to address the problem of extreme
poverty, because this is a challenge
that claims millions of lives every year. In
addition, there is the challenge of finding a
way to have long-term development consistent
with environmental sustainability and
the conservation of ecosystem functions.

The most urgent task is to address the
needs of the poorest of the poor. For them,
every day is a struggle for survival, and millions,
perhaps 10 to 20 million, lose that
struggle each year. These are tragedies that
are so dramatic and so unnecessary in their
scale that we need to turn our attention to
them. They’re also dangerous for the planet
because these are the places that end up in
chaos, violence and war, in mass movements
of population, and unfortunately
where Americans end up sending troops
and getting enmeshed in problems that
can’t be solved through military means.

I’ve identified six areas that I think are
crucial to ending extreme poverty—agriculture,
health, education, infrastructure, business
development, and environmental conservation—and that can be defined in very
implementable and practical terms. I’ve
been arguing for the past decade that we
can make tremendous headway against poverty,
killer diseases, the lack of productivity
of the rural poor, and so forth, through integrated
systems-based and technology-based
approaches in those six areas.

Even if those problems were to be addressed
adequately and quickly, it would not
at all solve the other overarching problem
on the planet. In fact, it would probably exacerbate
it mildly, though not very much.
And that’s the fact that—putting aside the
billion to a billion and a half poorest people—the five and a half billion others on the
planet are already using resources at such a
level, and are tending to increase their resource
use at such a rate, that the trajectory
of global society is unsustainable.

What areas should we focus on to become
more sustainable?

The first is to develop sustainable agriculture.
Agriculture accounts for about a third
of all greenhouse gas emissions. It also accounts
for the predominant challenges of
hydrology, invasive species, habitat destruction,
and so forth. We need to focus on sustainable
agriculture in far more thoughtful
ways than we have. There’s plenty of brilliant
insight and technical possibility for
quite significant progress. The second huge
area is the way we deploy energy. I think everybody
now recognizes that energy needs
to be overhauled, partly because of the
stresses of conventional energy sources and
also because of its environmental impacts,
especially related to climate change and
ocean acidification.

The third area is the host of industrial
ecology challenges. These are the traditional
pollutants, toxics, and waste products
that come from poorly engineered industrial
systems. The fourth thing we need to do
is to get control over the global population.
If we don’t, we’ll find that many of the solutions
we’re able to muster will keep getting
overwhelmed by the added billions of people
on the planet. Although population
growth has largely disappeared from public
discourse, it remains a very serious issue.

The fifth area is that even if we address
agriculture, energy, industrial ecology, and
population growth, there are regions
of the world that are at risk
of becoming essentially nonviable
in the next 50 years because of the
climate change that’s already under
way. Typically, these will be
among the poorest places in the world, partly
because environmentally marginal places
cause poverty and partly because these environmental
shocks will increase the numbers
of people trapped in poverty.

In which of these areas are we making the
most headway?

On the poverty side, there have been some
huge advances in disease control in the last
15 to 20 years because of new vaccinations
and new mechanisms for enabling poor
countries to take up these vaccines. The
Gates Foundation has had a major role in all
of this. There’s a new, proactive, and increasingly
effective campaign against malaria,
which is showing tremendous results. There
are some glimmers of breakthrough in the
chronic food crisis of Africa by showing how
the yields per hectare can be dramatically increased
even in very poor places. The leader
of this in recent years is a very poor country
in south central Africa—Malawi. You can
find these success stories, but at the same
time they don’t reach the continental scale
and certainly not the global scale.

An area where there has been a big impact
is information and communication
technology. It is the one area of technological
advance that’s now dramatically penetrating
the poor world on a market basis.
The most important example of this—and
it’s more than an example, it’s a transformation—is the spread of mobile phones to virtually
every village in the world. Five years
ago in the villages where I was working
there wasn’t a mobile phone in sight. Today,
on average, perhaps 25 percent to 30 percent
of the households in these villages own
their own mobile phone. This digital connectivity
provides a new platform for the
successful delivery of other technologies
and transformative changes.

Turning to the environment,
we have a tremendous portfolio
of promising technologies: new
ways to bring safe nuclear energy;
new ways to harness, transmit,
and store wind and solar energy; and
breakthroughs in electric vehicles, battery
storage, and integration of electric propulsion
with information and communication
technologies that are going to make cars not
only low emission but also a lot smarter.

In agriculture, there are many new
smart agricultural systems. There’s a
whole field of agroecology, low-till agriculture,
integrated pest management, microdose
fertilizer, better and more efficient
water management, biotechnologies for
drought-resistant crops, and other ecologically
sound farming methods.

Of course, the solutions to these problems
are not solely technological.

There are some areas of success in both
poverty alleviation and environmental sustainability,
but in neither case are we close
to achieving a globally scaled approach to
real solutions. That’s because the defining
aspect of both of these challenges is that
they won’t be solved by markets. They require
political decisions, and political decisions
require political will. Not the political
will of leaders, because our leaders are
mostly followers. It requires societies to
decide to act in their interest, in the interest
of others on the planet, and in the interest
of future generations. That is hard, because
it requires public consensus that needs to
be built on an understanding of these problems
in their mechanistic sense, as well as
the development of shared values that these
problems are important to address.

One of the challenges is that these
problems have come much faster than our
understanding or our institutions can accommodate.
The rise of China and India
and the implications of that for global energy,
food, climate functioning, as well as
geopolitics and the nature of the world
economy, have happened so fast that we
barely have begun to comprehend it in a
deep way. We have considerable widespread
anxiety, but we don’t have a lot of
healthy institutional change.

Most of the institutions that are charged
to deal with these problems are post-World
War II institutions like the United Nations,
or departments of government that were
created in the 20th century along structural
lines that are not equipped to understand
these challenges or to treat them in a holistic
way. The world has not developed a political
or ethical sensibility of a global society.

One can find overwhelming reasons for
optimism that there are technical solutions
to these problems. You can even define technologies
that either exist or are within reach
in the next 10 to 20 years that could achieve a
global scale to make a profound difference
on both of these challenges. But they don’t
add up to global problem solving yet.

One only has to look just off our southern
shore at Haiti to see that these problems
are still with us.

Exactly. Haiti demonstrates so many tragic
aspects of neglect. Low-cost structural reinforcement
of buildings could have saved
tens of thousands of lives. The tragedy also
demonstrates the unanticipated, bizarre,
and damaging consequences of U.S. actions
vis-à-vis Haiti over the last 30 years,
such as putting on trade embargos to try to
create political change that instead ended
up destroying the economy. And all of this
is happening an hour or two flight off of
our border. So yes, it’s a compelling demonstration
of how we’re just not quite getting
this right yet.